I emerge from the Q train at Herald Square and pass through the Garment District en route to the office. I have walked these streets nearly every day for over a decade and have come to know them, the good and the bad, as well as many native New Yorkers. But my knowledge has done nothing to dull my sense of wonder. I am still mystified by this city and the spell it casts, the gritty magic that drew my childhood imagination here through a television screen in Mount Olive, Mississippi. 

My backpack full of supplies bounces with each step along the pavement: tape measure, scissors, safety pins, laptop. I always have a pair of scissors handy, prepared to take a swatch from whatever fabric shop will let me. I know all the best shops in the city, and their staff members know me by name. I am thirty-six years old but remain the eager pupil at heart who marveled at a jar of countless mismatched buttons spread over newsprint on Momma Ruth’s floor, alternating my attention between her sewing and the Oprah Show. Oprah is off the air now and I don’t do much sewing myself, but the power of dressing strong women still pulses in me.

I walk through the city with the early morning crowd—just me, the pigeons, and the porters moving stock before business hours. I arrive at the fabric stores at opening time, before most designers roll out of bed, and sneak in like a stowaway among the private shoppers who arrive with their seamstresses to plan yet another modest dress in some new fabric. They assume that an expensive new print or embellishment will compensate for lack of an inventive silhouette; they are wrong, and their seamstresses know it. 

If I browse for a few minutes, one of the staff members will turn away from these boring but profitable clients as soon as they have a moment and call me over to the cutting table. “Parron!” they say. “I have something for you to see. This just came in!” they gleefully whisper, as if someone might be listening. Then they unfurl a bolt of something new from Italy or India or Turkey, and the threads rest against the white cutting table, shimmering in the light. I ask if they can swatch it for me. 

More often than not they give me a generous strip about four inches wide from selvedge to selvedge. The fabric splits cleanly as the blades shear through. I’m not timid about taking my own swatches from stock rolls, but I dare not cut these pieces myself. Such fabrics are like ancient scrolls: one wrong cut and the value is lost. I coil the treasured strip up in a zip-top bag and put it in my backpack. 

With the cutting part of this ritual complete, we move along to the gossip that defines any interaction in the Garment District. I’ll hear about everyone’s children, recent dating adventures, and what new bars to check out, then get an update on what big-budget streaming series recently ordered fabric to evoke high style in the 60s or the 80s or some other interesting decade. These fabric stores are as much about the people as the products. Even the products are really about people—who designed the print, the embroidery, the beading. Fabric is about people. Every staff member at these shops has their own story and their own reason for being in the business, but they all appreciate a designer who loves fabric as much as they do and whose designs can do justice to fine textiles. To them, seeing their prized threads shaped and worn and loved is the highest form of praise.

Sometimes the camaraderie and business intrigue shared during these morning chats make me think I might be happy working in a fabric shop. But then I look at the bolts of fabric lying on the cutting table and remember that this is where the job ends—with a cut. I consider the stack of designs on my desk and the garments they will become, the women whose days and nights will be brightened wearing them. And so the thought of selling fabric passes out of mind. What is the point of admiring fabric flat against a white linoleum table all day? Fabrics’ highest purpose is to bring people the confidence and joy that come from wearing them out in the world. As a designer, I am part of that transformation, and it all began in Mount Olive, Mississippi.

I spent so many childhood hours at Momma Ruth’s little house while my parents worked as educators in Lexington some miles away. Her home was nestled in the clay hills at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta. Mount Olive wasn’t even a proper place but a local name for the area of scattered houses and small farms around the Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, where Momma Ruth’s side of the family worshiped.  Back in the day, Momma Ruth and Granddaddy’s house looked out over the few acres of cotton that they owned bordered by rolling ravines of kudzu vines that consumed the land around them. 

Momma Ruth and Granddaddy didn’t have many precious things, and most things needed to pull double-duty. She’d sweep the bear floors with brooms of bundled reeds from the field, and she’d pull her grandbabies along the clay soil on cotton sacks during picking season. Everything came from the land and went back to it. Clothes were mostly cotton, and were darned until they wore out. When they wore out they were cut up for head wraps. When the wraps were finished, Momma Ruth used the scraps to lash her brooms together, and so it went. Life was hard, but Momma Ruth and Granddaddy owned their home and had what they needed to get by, which was more than most black folks on the delta could claim. But Momma Ruth was a schoolteacher and had the mixed blessing of a solid education, which made her one of only a handful of folks her age out in the hills who could read.

Busy as Momma Ruth was, whether working at school, watching grandbabies, or picking cotton, she made time to help her friends and family however she could. I remember our walks together to the spare little houses out in Mount Olive, where folks would give whatever they could to show gratitude for help reading their bills and other important mail. I can still see Sister Jackson, a friend from the Missionary Baptist Church, standing proud and more than filling her doorway with a basket full of sweet potatoes. Sister Jackson was kind but hard, and I knew it pained her to have a neighbor know her business before she did and to have it read aloud like that was just about as much as Sister Jackson could bear. Her mouth was always turned down and she would cut her eyes at me. She appreciated Momma Ruth’s visits and didn’t mind giving her the sweetest jewels of her harvest; it was being reminded of what she couldn’t do for herself that hurt. 

Momma Ruth wasn’t too sweet on the arrangement either. She didn’t prize the task of knowing folks’ business and had no desire for their resentment. But I knew she was proud and that other folks sensed that. It wasn't always that way. Folks used to feel closer, like family, and held each other up. “You reap what you sow,” she’d say about the widening divide. But the loss of those bonds was one among the many changes she had seen in Mount Olive over the years. The whole landscape had changed since she was a girl. She knew the hills before the government planted kudzu to control erosion, and our walks drew her along roads choked with vines but still poor and unloved. “If I was a man, I’d burn it all down!” she’d say, sweeping her hand across the horizon. As we’d walk up the road to Momma Ruth and Granddaddy’s house her frustration would get the better of her. “We got the raggediest house out here,” she’d say, as we would come upon the little house in a bare dirt patch behind cotton rows. She knew that things could be better.

We would make our way inside in time for Oprah and Momma Ruth would open old newspapers on the floor for me to play on. She’d squeeze the lid to her button jar and out would tumble so many buttons in different colors and textures—bone and shell and glass and Bakelite—scattered over the faded newsprint advertisements for women’s dresses and shoes. With me adequately preoccupied, she’d go to her sewing corner, the one place in the house that was properly and totally hers. It was her home altar, where she’d make magic from scraps for friends and family to wear at Sunday service or on special occasions. The cast iron Singer machine stood proud against the wall like an organ, its worn petal would rock up and down under Momma Ruth’s foot while the needle rattled along. 

Plentiful as used garments and scraps were, Momma Ruth took every opportunity to have Granddaddy drive her to Durant or Greenwood for something finer. She would sometimes treat herself to yardage of her favorite fabric, silk georgette, to make a church dress for herself or my mother. She’d handle it like a baby, she would lift it gingerly and lay it on the store’s cutting table with care. Once safely back home, she would scurry to her corner and inspect her sewing caddy for all the supplies needed to complete her task.

The caddy hung over her sewing machine, a column of pockets rendered in a circus print fabric that, to my childish eyes, was the most luxurious scene in the world. Her fingers, graceful and delicate despite decades of cotton-picking and child-raising, would leaf carefully through folded pattern pieces that protruded from bulging red pockets covered in images of clowns who shot water from their lapels and seals that balanced yellow balls on their noses.  The tools in this caddy, the patterns and pins and thread, were the only things in her home that were completely hers and pliable to her imagination. And atop them all, in the highest pocket of that red circus caddy, rested a pair of sharp metal shears with chipped black-painted handles. She would turn back to the kitchen table, her arms filled with these sacred instruments, and set about her business. 

I watched the onion paper of her dress pattern as it unfolded in the afternoon light and cast a fragile shadow over the sea of silk. Her precious scissors rent the silk with the rare and delicate crunch of footsteps on grass in morning frost. The machine chirped along and stitched these pieces into folds and pleats and curves that brought joy to Momma Ruth’s eyes like nothing else in the world. I would ask her to keep the scraps to play with. “Make every stitch and every inch count,” she’d say. I would take the crepe-y scraps of those projects and tie ragged bits of georgette around my little play toys so that they might feel joy like Momma Ruth felt in her dresses. I still feel that way when draping fabrics on models, always looking for that glimmer of joy in their eyes, like the fabric I put on them has allowed them to discover something new and beautiful within themselves.

Momma Ruth died when I was thirteen, and she never knew that her love for silk georgette would inspire me to become a fashion designer and make it all the way to New York City. Her house caught fire while I was away at college; all was lost—her patterns and scissors and sewing machine, and even a cedar chest full of fabric and quilts. Sad as that was, I almost think she would have wanted it to be that way. I think back on that little house amidst the kudzu and the neighbors who couldn’t love Momma Ruth’s best gifts. She knew too well how sad a place can be when beset by all the wrong sorts of change. It was time to make something new.

I carry her home with me and find myself thinking of her whenever I see silk georgette in the Garment District. And though I love some fine silk, I also see beauty in discarded fabric. Whole bolts are thrown on the trash heap for the slightest imperfection. I was recently given a whole roll of ecru cotton canvas with a roving blue toile print of knotty branches and lush clustered leaves. It had ended up in a charity sale because of a running smudge in the print. “Make every stitch and every inch count,” I think to myself, and I leave my backpack full of imported swatches by the door, pull out my sharpest scissors, and set to work making Momma Ruth proud.